"The Righteous Detest The Dishonest"

"The righteous detest the dishonest; the wicked detest the upright," says Proverbs 29:27.  This is not the only time the Bible speaks of people hating the wicked neutrally or in positive light.  David identifies himself as hating those who hate God and viewing them as enemies (Psalm 139:22).  Two verses later, in Psalm 139:24, he asks God to see if there is anything sinful in him.  He did not think of his hatred of the wicked as evil left to itself.  While earlier verses of this Psalm are fairly popular in evangelical communities, these latter verses are not.  However, the rest of the Bible clearly concurs with what David is conveying about hatred of the wicked not being immoral.  As Ecclesiastes says without qualifying that it cannot be directed towards fellow humans, there is a time to love and a time to hate (3:8).

God loves people in general, yes (John 3:16), even unrepentant sinners (Romans 5:8, Jonah 4:2), and especially people who love and submit to him (Psalm 30:5, 103:11).  There are also many verses where God is said to rightfully hate sinners in general, and certain sinners in particular (Leviticus 20:23, 26:44, Deuteronomy 25:15-16, Psalm 5:5-6, 11:5, Proverbs 3:31-32, 6:16-19, 11:20, Hosea 9:15, Malachi 1:2-3).  The righteous can imitate God in this way, honoring the being whose nature grounds righteousness, and can thus hate without stooping to injustice because of it--for instance, someone could hate a gratuitous liar (Leviticus 19:11) without mistreating him or her by physical assault (Exodus 21:18-19).

One cannot hate sin without hating at least a part of the sinner, and if someone is unrepentant in their stupidity and other immorality, they can be legitimately hated as long as one does not mistreat them by making assumptions, slandering them, abusing them with words or physical actions, and so on.  If there is such a thing as evil, then it would by necessity deserve loathing, for it is what should not be done.  To have an intense or even passionate dislike for it could not possibly be invalid on its own.  It is not as if the Bible, with its many commands for people to love each other (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:37-40) and various statements about God's love, denies any of these things that are true by logical necessity if morality, as well as wickedness (deviation from obligation), exists at all.

Proverbs 29:27 says the righteous hate the dishonest.  Some of the other aforementioned verses single out the dishonest as being among those God despises (Deuteronomy 25:15-16, 5:5-6).  The righteous are righteous because they are like God, and although hatred of this kind is good but not obligatory in the same way that mercy is (it is not commanded and therefore falls into Deuteronomy 4:2), there is no ideological error or moral failing in mere hatred under the right circumstances.  Proverbs 29:27 calls the people who hate the dishonest righteous.  They are not in the wrong for harboring this attitude, which does not interfere with loving their neighbor as themself unless they allow it to: there is no contradiction and thus no logical impossibility in loving and hating the same thing of person simultaneously.

This is true of love either as emotional affection or as the just treatment of everyone no matter how ones feels about them.  What is philosophically invalid is hating what does not merit hatred and allowing hatred of falsities and evil to overpower one's rationality, love, and justice.  Far from being sin, it is natural for any willing righteous person to hate those who are not like them, since they would not be hating someone else for not being in accordance with their whims, but with objective moral obligations.  The wicked could only be in error for hating the righteous or anyone who is morally superior to them to any extent.  Their hatred is irrational and evil in itself because of their intentions and the object of their abhorrence; that of God and the righteous is not the same kind.